2. Intro­duce herd effect in highly per­son­al­ized form. The hotel sign in the bath­room informed the guests that many pri­or guests chose to be envir­on­ment­ally friendly by recyc­ling their tow­els. How­ever, when the mes­sage men­tioned that major­ity of the guests who stayed in this spe­cif­ic room chose to be more envir­on­ment­ally con­scious and reused their tow­els, tow­el recyc­ling jumped 33%, even though the mes­sage was largely the same.

The news that Obama had some of the lead­ing beha­vi­our­ists advising his cam­paign comes as no sur­prise to me, how­ever I likely under­es­tim­ated how much they influ­enced both the cam­paign and the voters.

The exist­ence of this beha­vi­or­al dream team â€” which also included best-selling authors Dan Ari­ely of MIT (Pre­dict­ably Irra­tion­al) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sun­stein of the Uni­ver­sity of Chica­go (Nudge) as well as Nobel laur­eate Daniel Kahne­man of Prin­ceton â€” has nev­er been pub­licly dis­closed, even though its mem­bers gave Obama white papers on mes­saging, fun­drais­ing and rumor con­trol as well as voter mobil­iz­a­tion. All their pro­pos­als â€” among them the fam­ous online fun­drais­ing lot­ter­ies that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama â€” came with foot­notes to peer-reviewed aca­dem­ic research. “It was amaz­ing to have these bul­let points telling us what to do and the sci­ence behind it,” Moffo tells TIME. “These guys really know what makes people tick.”

Pres­id­ent Obama is still rely­ing on beha­vi­or­al sci­ence. But now his Admin­is­tra­tion is using it to try to trans­form the coun­try. Because when you know what makes people tick, it’s a lot easi­er to help them change.

While I like this pro­gress­ive move, Iâ€”like Mind Hacks’ Vaughanâ€”feel the need to ask, “Where are the scep­tic­al voices?”

In a 2004 exper­i­ment, he and a col­league left dif­fer­ent mes­sages on doorknobs in a middle-class neigh­bor­hood north of San Diego. One type urged the res­id­ents to con­serve energy to save the earth for future gen­er­a­tions; anoth­er emphas­ized fin­an­cial sav­ings. But the only kind of mes­sage to have any sig­ni­fic­ant effect [â€¦] was one that said neigh­bors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

You can see how effect­ive this is just by look­ing at the graph­ic used to head the Times’ art­icle. This has now got me won­der­ing how this could be used with recyc­ling.